The Internet is replete with information resources, multimedia and otherwise. Some are incredibly popular, being visited by millions of visitors per day. Examples include news-centric sites such as Fark.com by Fark.com, LLC of Lexington, Ky. and Digg.com by Digg, Inc. of San Francisco, Calif. which solicit audience references and reaction to news stories; image and streaming video sites, such as Flickr.com by Yahoo! Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., and YouTube.com by YouTube, Inc. of San Bruno, Calif.
Social sites, such as Friendster.com by Friendster, Inc. of San Francisco, and LinkedIn.com by LinkedIn Corporation of Palo Alto, Calif., each allow people to contact each other, according to patented rules of engagement.
Personal sites, such as MySpace.com by MySpace, Inc. of Los Angeles, Calif., Facebook.com by Facebook, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., encourage a hybrid, wherein the aspects of a content resource site and the interpersonal elements of a social site combine. In each of MySpace and Facebook, enrollees are encouraged to build web pages for others to visit. MySpace emphasizes content as a mechanism to find other people, while FaceBook emphasizes sharing photographs with friends.
Many such social, personal, and information resource sites sustain eager followings that visit such a site one or more times per day. Considering the information and resources they discover valuable not only themselves, but also to their friends and colleagues, these explorers of the Internet are able to copy content, such as the text of a news article, or copy a link, and paste their find into an email. The email can be distributed to a single associate, or to a whole mailing list. Most sites seek to expand their visitorship, and to promote this, provide ‘send this article’ buttons that provide an already-intrigued site visitor with a tool to send a computer generated email from the site to one or more friends whose email addresses the visitor must provide. Examples include Digg's “Email It” and YouTube's “Send Video”, and “Sign In To E-Mail Or Save This” on NewYorkTimes.com by The New York Times Company of New York, N.Y.
There are drawbacks, however.
Email can be clunky to use. Cut-and-pasted links don't always survive the word-wrap of an email reader. Images or formatting of an article don't reliably survive, even if the multimedia email makes it through corporate firewalls and SPAM screens.
Conscientious friends are circumspect about blithely providing their friends' email addresses for website sponsored mailing programs. While high-profile, big-company sites may be generally perceived as trustworthy and not prone to spamming potential customers, the same perceptions may not hold of smaller, lesser known, less established web sites.
Further, even were one to read and trust the privacy policy of one site having valuable content, the situation facing the well-read web denizen is that there are hundreds of such sites that one might visit per week, each with policies that periodically change.
Still more, some sites offer tools such as friends-lists that allow the entry and easy access to those email addresses you use frequently. For exampled, Share2Me by Nextumi, Inc. of Dublin, Ohio.
Some social networking sites, such as implemented in the web site Friendster.com and taught by Abrahms in U.S. Pat. No. 7,069,308, allow enrollees to indicate other individuals with whom they have a personal relationship. Information defining the relationship is processed to reveal the series of social relationships connecting any two individuals within the social network so that the relationship chains between any two individuals can be displayed. In use, a user of the site has access to tools to determine the optimal chain of relationships to reach desired individuals and be introduced (or introduce themselves) and initiate direct communication.
LinkedIn.com by six degrees, inc. of New York, uses a slightly different approach permit those who enroll to enter names and email addresses of friends or colleagues. Linked-In is an implementation of U.S. Pat. No. 6,175,831, by Weinreich, et al., which teaches an enrollee may define a relationship which may be confirmed or denied by the other member so that all relationships are mutually, reciprocally defined.
However, any one social site is limited by the degree in which it succeeds in attracting enrollees who wish to communicate among themselves regarding content available within the site.
A few sites promote that enrollees (and others) contribute content links to the database. Digg is such a site, and each contributed link is effectively (and numerically) a vote for that content. Thus, content links known to the system have a popularity rank. This is analogous to the page rank used in the significance indexing performed by Google, Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. on their web site Google.com where links by other web pages to a target web page increase the rank of the target web page.
Digg.com also allows enrollees build a profile comprised of contributed links that a list of friends can view or receive as an RSS feed. RSS is a widely used mechanism for subscribing to a source of content.
Digg, however, suffers from the drawback that their content is summarized as brief text extracts, or titles.
Also, as with web sites that attract new visitors to themselves by providing tools to current visitors that generate emails of recommended links, Digg.com provides tools with which an enrollee may email others (enrolled or not) a reference to any content link contributed to the Digg.com site. This has the advantage of not facing the burden or risk of entering friends and colleagues' email addresses on each of many sites, but only a single site.
To a casual user, a drawback of sites which are so strongly rooted in uploading content, as are MySpace and Facebook, is that a vast majority of potential users do not have time or inclination to create content. Still, they would enjoy and benefit from the ability to forward links to content that they know would be of interested to a friend.
None of the above technologies facilitates conveniently expanding one's network of friends on the basis that you like content they've selected. Further, none of these methods facilitates conveniently expanding one's network of friends on the basis that you like content they like.
There remains a need for a social networking site that allows social linking between individuals having a common interest, based on the content they choose to share.